Excerpt from The California Column: Its Campaigns and Services in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, During the Civil War, With Sketches of Brigadier General James H. Carleton, Its Commander, and Other Officers and Soldiers Immediately after the first battle of Bull Run, July 24th, 1861. Governor John G. Downey, of California, received from the Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, a communication which said: "The War Department accepts, for three years, one regiment of infantry and five companies of cavalry, to guard the Overland Mail Route, from Carson Valley to Salt Lake City and Fort Laramie." This was the first official action towards organizing troops in California, and it required but a short time to raise the required number of men, and as fast as the companies were mustered in, at the Presidio, near San Francisco, they were transported across the bay, to Camp Downey, near where are now located the railroad shops, eastward of the Mole. In the meantime the government at Washington had an insane idea of preparing an army, on the Pacific, to be composed principally of regulars, then stationed on the coast, and under the command of General E. V. Sumner, who was in command of the Department of California, then ship them down the coast, to Mazatlan, where they were to disembark, and proceed overland, "to western Texas, and regain the public property in that state, and draw off insurgent troops from Arkansas, Missouri, etc." This movement was not to General Sumner's taste, although the governor had been directed to organize four more regiments of infantry, and one of cavalry, to take the place of the regular troops that were to go on the Texas raid. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.